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June 1997 Henry A. Wallace: His Search for a New World Order, by Graham White and John Maze. Chapel Hill, NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Hardcover, 347page. Few modern American political figures are more intriguing than Henry A. Wallace, farm journalist, agrarian scientist, New Deal Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President of the United States (1941- 45), and finally quixotic candidate for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948. While Wallace stood in the superheated political pressure-cooker of Washington during the Franklin Roosevelt years of depression and World War II, and remained a prominent name in the Truman years of emerging cold war, in some ways he never seemed totally to belong under the capitol dome. Something in him always seemed to be elsewhere. The man from Iowa was also on a deeply personal and often unconventional spiritual quest. From it flowed both the inner alienation and the profound commitment to world order, and to "progress" as he understood it, that kept him in the messy world of politics. His simple, unpretentious way of life seemed to be part of that character. Needless to say, Wallace was loved for his genuine humanity and hopeful visions, and damned by those who saw him as hopelessly naive, with his "head in the clouds" above such things as communism and the real nature of world politics. The full contours of Wallace's spiritual journey were not widely known during his life. He was in fact a member of the Theosophical Society in America from 1925 to 1935 and was active in the Liberal Catholic Church in Des Moines between 1925 and 1929. He corresponded with the Irish theosophical mystic, poet, and agrarian reformer George Russell (''AE'') and in 1931- 32 successfully took a Theosophical correspondence course from the Temple of the People in Halcyon, California. In the early New Deal years the Iowan established a complex and controversial relationship with the Russian mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich. Letters Wallace wrote to Roerich often couched in effusive occult language, the so-called "guru letters," were later obtained by political enemies and used against him. Partly because of the political quicksand likely to engulf a public esotericist, about the same time he came to Washington in 1933 Wallace commenced attending a "high" Episcopal church, combining Anglo-Catholic worship with a liberal vision of Christianity and its social mission. All these diverse spiritual resources went into Wallace's role as custodian of the New Deal spirit in its most idealistic form, and his dream that the twentieth century could, in the title of his popular 1943 book, become the "century of the common man." Henry A. Wallace, the work of two Australian scholars, attempts to interpret this vision and its spiritual sources. Unfortunately the product is a bit uneven. White and Maze appear not especially well informed about the actual culture of American Theosophy. The recent archival work of Mark Kleinman on Wallace's spirituality, published in articles in Peace and Change and The Annals of Iowa, seems not to have been available to them; this material from Wallace's papers would have fleshed out considerably the youthful idealist's relation to Theosophical correspondents and institutions. More surprisingly, White and Maze were also apparently unfamiliar with the subject's later participation in the Episcopal church and his liberal Christian writings like Statesmanship and Religion (1934). On the other hand, these authors present a full and useful account of the Roerich affair, although here too one suspects there is still more to be known. Whatever the limitations of their information on Theosophy and other forms of unconventional spirituality with which Wallace was involved, they are generally sympathetic in their handling of it. A complete account of the spiritual life and vision of this extraordinary statesman remains to be written, if indeed the task is possible. For as prominent and recent a figure as he, the subject of several more political than spiritual biographies, extant information and interpretations remain remarkably varied, full of puzzling inconsistencies, and leave a sense of something, perhaps a master key, still missing. If only as a reminder of how much remains to be done by biographers, this book, attempting to balance the picture with serious attention to his spiritual life, is a serviceable starting-point for those seeking fresh perspectives on the man's life and ideas. For those involved in Theosophy and other forms of alternative spirituality, the book is also a salutary reminder that such ideas and ideals can and sometimes do have consequences at the highest levels. -ROBERT S. ELLWOOD June 1997 How to Use Your Nous, by A. E. I. Falconar. Maughold, Isle of Man: Non-Aristolelian Publishing, 1987, 1997. Pp. ii+30. Nous is a word borrowed from Greek, rare in American L1SC, but more common in British, where it is usually pronounced to rime with mouse, rather than with moose, as in American use. It means "intelligence" (though the British often use it to mean "gumption, common sense"), and H. P. Blavatsky used it specifically in the sense of "buddhi." This booklet proposes and correlates several approaches to being "nousful," that is, having an intuitive, nonrational, but very practical insight into the nature of things. One of those is Krishnamurti's teachings on self-realization. Another is Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which offers a number of practical suggestions for coping with the world, such as remembering that the name of a thing is not the thing itself, so the word rose is not after all a rose. That may seem obvious, but every day we for, get that principle and respond to the labels we put on things rather than to the things themselves, a process called stereotyping. So we think that all Chinese are inscrutable, or all Italians are great singers, or all Indians are spiritual, or all Americans are materialistic. (Or, as H. L. Mencken remarked, an idealist is one who believes that because a rose smells better than a cabbage, it also makes better soup.) Korzybski's techniques, called non-Aristotelian thinking, are properly supplemental rather than alternative ways of dealing with the world. Aristotle's logic (which holds that nothing is both A and nor-A, everything is either A or not-A, etc.) is not absolutely wrong; it is just not absolutely right. It: is right part of the time, for particular purposes, but it is not right all of the time for all purposes, as the Buddhist logicians knew, as well as Korzybski. Indeed, Falconar also cites Zen koans and Tibetan visual meditations as alternative ways o dealing with non-Aristotelian reality, along with poetry and mysticism. This booklet usefully correlates a number of seemingly unrelated techniques to cope with the world, especially Korzybski's, whose approach is sometimes thought to be anti-mystical, but only when mysticism is misunderstood as opposed to empiricism or phenomenology. In fact, the mystic is radically empirical and phenomenological. -].A.
A Treatise on the Pâramîs, from the Commentary to the Cariyâpitaka, by Acariya Dhammapala. Trans. Bhikkhu Bodi. Kandy, SriLanka: Buddhist Publication Society, 1996. Pp. 76. The third section of H. P. Blavatsky's spiritual guidebook, The Voice of the Silence, called "The Seven Portals," is devoted primarily to a consideration of the Buddhist paramitas, or transcendent qualities to be developed on the Path. The paramitas are generally associated with Northern Buddhism as the qualifications to be developed by a Bodhisattva, but they appear in the Southern canon as well, as does also the concept of the Bodhisattva. The Southern exposition of these qualities is the subject of this book. The early suttas of Southern Buddhism, written in the sacred language Pali and corresponding to the Sanskrit sutras, mention three types of persons who have attained Nirvana by following three distinct "vanes" or vehicles (that is, spiritual paths): 1. sammasambuddha, a perfectly enlightened Buddha, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and teaches the dharma to others, founding a dispensation; 2. paccekabuddha, a solitary enlightened person, who achieves Buddhahood without the aid of a teacher, and does not reach others or found a dispensation; 3. arahat, a disciple who achieves Buddhahood through the instruction of a perfectly enlightened Buddha and then teaches others within the bounds of the dispensation of a sammasambuddha. Later Buddhist writings include stories about the backgrounds of these three types of enlightened persons, including the Bodhisattva, a candidate for Buddhahood, a "germinal Buddha" of the first type. The Bodhisattva became the great ideal of the Northern School, which then tended to treat the other two types (in Sanskrit pratyekabuddha and arhat) as merely provisional or lesser ways. Although the Bodhisattva concept was present also in the Southern School, it lacked the privileged status it had in Northern Buddhism. One of the jataka (or previous birth) tales of the Southern canon tells that eons ago, the Buddha, then a Bodhisattva born as the ascetic Sumedha, vowed before the Buddha Dipankara (the twenty-fourth Buddha of antiquity) that he would renounce his right to enter nirvana so that he might become a teaching Buddha in the future and thus save multitudes of beings. Having made that vow, he reflected on the qualities needed to achieve it; they were the ten "paramis" (Sanskrit "paramitas''}, which became the "requisites of enlightenment." The Sanskrit term "paramira'' is from the root "param'' meaning "supreme, beyond." The word is sometimes analyzed as ending in "ita" meaning "gone" and thus is interpreted as "gone beyond" or "gone to the supreme," the notion being that these qualities are those needed by the one who has so gone. The ten paramitas were described by the sixth century Pali commentator Acariya Dhammapala in his "Treatise on the Paramis" as qualities necessary for deliverance. That treatise is put into English in this short book. The Sanskrit and Pali canons give the following lists of Paramiras:
giving (dåna) giving virtue (shîla) virtue renunciation patience (kshânti) patience determination energy (vîrya) energy equanimity meditation (dhyâna) [meditation] loving-kindness wisdom (prajñā) wisdom truthfulness
-M.D.
Medical Intuition: How to Combine Inner Resources with Modern Medicine, by Ruth Berger, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995. Pp. 143. Paper. The author of Medical Intuition, Ruth Berger, is a psychic and a consultant: in the field of intuition who is known to television and radio audiences. Medical Intuition is her second publication, the first being The Secret Is in the Rainbow: Aura Interrelationships, which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Although the praises of two medical physicians preface the text, the author draws attention to an unorthodox approach to health care when she refers in her opening paragraph to persons with supposedly incurable ailments who feel that they are guinea pigs hoping for some "magical treatment" to be discovered in time to save their lives. Berger's response is that their reaction should be to stop waiting and to "listen" to their own bodies. The direct approach of the book, written in the second person to address the reader directly, is an attractive feature. The format is sometimes a catalog of symptoms and a list of seemingly futile events in an individual's search for recovery. The author employs lay terms throughout. The general advice is to trust one's instincts as guidance to the right doctor and the right staff (or health care. Yet, states Berger, doctors are not gods. Medical intuition is described as not about diagnosing illness but about locating energy blockages. The author also considers past-life recall in the healing process as a means of releasing the pain of the past and also of escaping the traumas of childhood. All of this, states Berger, is part of understanding and identifying one's fears and problems. The author never states that any of this is easy; yet she stresses that tapping into the universal consciousness is possible for all through meditation and faith in one's inherent abilities. Creating order in one's life is one of the keys, says Berger. Medical Intuition may contain information and advice that anyone with pain or other health difficulties is seeking. -Mary Jane Newcomb July 1997 Les histoires de Gopal, by Louis Moliné. Trans. Edith Deri. Paris: Editions Adyar, 1995. Pp. [vii] + [146] (71 double pages + [4]). Paper. Les histoires de Gopal (The Stories of Gopal) center upon a disciple whose dialogues and parables illustrate a philosophical system embodying the concept of God, who exists universally and thus in the consciousness of human beings and in all animate and all inanimate objects; the basis for morality, the means of awakening consciousness in a world of illusion; and the realization of the self. The format is a series of brief dialogues between Gopal, the disciple, and his Master. Often the Master's questions are subtle, returning Gopal to the concept that the world and all human experiences are illusion. Occasionally, familiar dialogues occur, such as the sequence in which the Master carries a young girl across the water. Space and time seem nonexistent in some of the dialogues. If the Master asks Gopal to go for water to quench his thirst, Gopal does not question where he will find water in the desert but may become lost in time as well as space during his search. Eventually he finds his way back to the Master with the jug miraculously filled with fresh water. The margin between dream and reality is very thin here as elsewhere in the stories. Occasionally rather than answers there are only rhetorical questions--the disciple must intuit the appropriate procedure. Unity of existence is never forgotten and serves as guide; it is stressed throughout the collection. Although death is conceived as the real joy, the Master clarifies that the disciple needs to experience all of life—human love not excluded. Each is a part of the whole, including sinfulness, and must be confronted or even experienced. Even so, all is illusion, and unanswered questions may be the greatest source of learning for the reader. -Mary Jane Newcomb July 1997 The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland's Century, 1590-1710, by David Stevenson (Cambridge: University Press, 1988, reprinted 1993), xvii + 246 pp. The history of Freemasonry is a mixture of myth, legend, inference, documentation, and imagination. It is usual, especially in those histories of the Craft written in England or under English influence, to begin Masonic history proper with the formation of the United Grand Lodge in 1717, which brought together four existing London lodges. Obviously, Freemasonry and Freemasonic lodges must have existed earlier; otherwise there would have been nothing to unite into the Grand Lodge. But of the earlier forms of those lodges and their practice, little heretofore has been documented. David Stevenson, the author of The Origins of Freemasonry, is Professor of Scottish History at the University of St. Andrews. As a good Scotsman, he finds the origins of modern Freemasonry, not in England, but in Scotland more than a century before the formation of the English Grand Lodge. Even more interesting, he also finds those origins partly in the esoteric currents that swept Europe at the time of the Renaissance, thus linking modern Freemasonry with the Wisdom Tradition of the Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, Hermeticists, and others. In the Middle Ages, skilled workers were organized into trade guilds, which served a number of purposes. They helped to regulate the trades by maintaining standards of competence among the workers and preserving the secrets of their crafts from interlopers. They provided religious, moral, and charitable reinforcement for their craftsmen. They served as social clubs. They developed ceremonies of initiation for newcomers. They developed mythical histories about the origins of their crafts. Among the various trades, that of the stonemason was unusually suitable for an elaborate craft organization. Whereas most craftsmen were settled in a particular locality, stonemasons were traveling men, moving to sites where their skill was in special demand. Thus they had more need than most for the support of their fellows. In addition to conventional guilds, which were bodies incorporated by a particular township, stonemasons developed a lodge system, not under municipal control. The early lodge structure was a building on a construction site probably for the use of stonemasons as a workshop, temporary living quarters, and social club. Because they could expect to have strangers turning up and claiming the benefit of local services, stonemasons developed signs of recognition, manual and verbal, by which they could identify one of their own. Stonemasons were also an unusually proud craft. Whereas most craftsmen (wainwrights, weavers, carpenters, leatherworkers, and so on) made products that were relatively short-lived, the stonemasons constructed buildings that endured. Their products were such as the great cathedrals of the laud. Moreover, their craft was an application of the art of geometry, so was nor merely a trade, but an expression of one of the most important of the liberal arts. Though Stevenson does not elaborate, the concept and term liberal arts is perhaps significant for the etymology of the term freemason. There were seven liberal arts. Three, the lesser or trivium (from which we derive the word trivial), were linguistic: grammar, logic, rhetoric. Four, the greater or quadrivium, were mathematical: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music. The arts practiced by ordinary trades were the cues serviles, the "servile arts," or arts of service. The liberal arts or artes liberales were the arts that liberate or make one a free person-free, that is, from the bonds of ignorance. It is usually supposed that some masons were called "free" because they were not bound to a specific locality, but were itinerants, free to move from place to place without control by the local guilds. It is possible, however, that they called themselves freemasons because they practiced one of the free or liberal arts, as opposed to the cowens, who were unskilled masons, not in possession of the liberating secrets of the craft. Because of their pride of product and liberal learning, the traditions, mythical histories, ceremonies, secrets, and social bonding of stonemasons were stronger and more elaborate than those of other crafts. Their traditions got expressed in what are called the "Old Charges," which record an elaborate mythical history, deriving the craft of stonemasonry from such distinguished antecedents as the biblical sons of Lamech, who constructed pillars on or in which were recorded the secrets of antiquity so that they might survive the Flood. Other figures and events in the Old Charges include the building of the Tower of Babel, Nimrod and Nineveh, Hermes Trismegistus (under the name Hermarius) in ancient Egypt, Euclid's development of geometry, King Solomon and the building of the Holy Temple, Charles Martel of France, and King Athelstan of England, the reputed founder of English Freemasonry. According to Stevenson, this early trade system of stonemasonry with its legends and practices was converted into Freemasonry in Scotland beginning in the late 1500s by William Schaw (1550-1602). Schaw, Master of Works and General Warden of the Scottish Masons, was a diplomat, architect, and civil servant in the court of King James VI of Scotland, who, after the death of Elizabeth I, was to become King James I of England. Schaw issued two sets of statutes, consisting of "ordinances to be observed by all master masons within this realm" of Scotland. The first Schaw statutes established a coherent masonic lodge system for, all Scotland, with a Warden in each lodge elected annually by its master masons and a General Warden (himself) for the whole country. This system of autonomous craft lodges existed in parallel with the civil incorporations chartered and controlled by the burgh councils, which also appointed a Deacon as the civil administrator in the incorporation. (The modern precedence in Freemasonry of Wardens over Deacons seems therefore to minor the eventual triumph of the autonomous lodge system over the civil incorporations.) The second Schaw statutes were especially directed toward some specific matters. For example, they directed the Warden of Kilwinning Lodge to test every Entered Apprentice and Fellowcraft for competence in "the art of memorie and science thairof." The significance of this reference to "the art of memorie" is noted below. Both Schaw statutes were issued on the same symbolic date: December 28 (in successive years, 1598 and 1599). The significance of the date is that it: is the day following the feast of Sr. John the Evangelist, one of the "twin" patron saints of modern Freemasonry (the other being St. John the Baptist, whose feast is at: midsummer, balancing the midwinter feast: of the Evangelist). The implication is that sixteenth-century Scottish masons had a main business and doubtless ritual meeting on Sr. John's Day, at which they adopted the statures, which were then promulgated on the following day. (It is noteworthy that, to this day, some Freemasonic bodies devote their last: meeting in December to the main business activity of the group.) Stevenson supposes that this proro-Freemasonic organizational structure was vivified by a merger with Renaissance esoteric interests: Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Alchemy, and Rosicrucianism. Among the propositions characteristic of these reborn ancient philosophies were the following: All matter is alive. The universe is conscious, an emanation from God. The cosmos is an organic unity. All parts of the cosmos are in sympathetic correspondence, so that it is possible to know the whole from any part. Spiritual forces can be controlled and used consciously in the process called "magic." The goal of "magic" is spiritual enlightenment and union with the divine. Other complexes that Stevenson sees as paralleling or contributing to Freemasonic practice were emblem books, Vitruvian architecture, and the art of memory. Emblem books were collections of complex allegorical, symbolic pictures-visual texts with esoteric interpretations that were associated with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was not until the time of the French Egyptologist Jean Francois Champollion (1790-1832) that hieroglyphics were deciphered and the system governing their use understood. The designs in emblem books were an early Western imitation of what Renaissance esotericists understood to be the principles of hieroglyphics: a system "veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols." Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a first-century BC Roman architect, engineer, and author (De architectura). He described architecture as applied geometry, the queen of the sciences, requiring all seven liberal arts for its practice. It was through the Vitruvian philosophy and symbolism of architecture that God came to be regarded as the Great Architect. Vitruvian architecture, very popular in the Renaissance, was a key factor in transforming the common trade of masonry into the gentlemanly philosophy of Freemasonry. Stevenson identifies Schaw's directive to test Entered Apprentices and Fellowcrafts in "the art of memorie and science thairof" as a reference to the Classical art of memory. It was a technique that enjoyed an enthusiastic revival in the Renaissance, being vigorously propagated, for example, by Giordano Bruno, who had disciples in England and Scotland, including a company ion of William Schaw's. The art of memory enabled orators and others to memorize with detailed precision long speeches and other texts. It was a very useful skill in the ancient world, where public oratory served the functions of modern television, newspapers and magazines, and the internet. The orator had to know the subject and be able to deliver it effectively. The art of memory also had an obvious usefulness for Freemasons, especially in the days before any form of written ritual existed. For then the long and complex rituals of the Craft had to be committed to and transmitted by memory. But especially significant to Masonry Was the technique used to achieve that end. Those who studied the Classical art of memory were directed to construct a mental building with many rooms, which the rememberer would he accustomed in imagination to pass through in a fixed order. The rooms were then fancifully furnished and occupied by objects and figures associated with the particular details to he remembered. The rememberer mentally walked through the rooms interacting with the objects and figures. The more grotesque or unexpected the latter, the better, (or the more they would impress the memory and thus the more readily recall their associated details. The art of memory was basically a mnemonic technique associating the things to be remembered with the parts of a building. Simple mnemonic devices are still used today, for example, roygbiv (pronounced "roy-gee-biv''} for the colors of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet; and Every good boy does fine for the notes of the lines of the treble clef: e, g, b, d, f. The Art of Memory was a much more sophisticated and complex mnemonic tool, treated by Frances A. Yates, a leading authority on Renaissance esotericism in a book of that name. Stevenson proposes that the Mason's lodge room is actually a building of the type used by the art of memory. If that is so, Freemasonry was originally entirely a nonphysical activity like chess, rather than a physical one like bridge. One cannot play bridge without a deck of cards; the physical pasteboards are an essential to the card game, which is basically a material activity. But in chess, the board and the pieces arc useful only, as mnemonic aids, for the game is really nonphysical. Chess players can (and skillful ones often do) play merely by calling out their moves to each other. Mental chess requires a keen memory, for which the material board and pieces arc only substitutes or mnemonic aids. The implication of Stevenson's view of the Freemasonic lodge as a building of memory is that it: was in the first place nor a physical room at all, but a mental construct imaginatively furnished and inhabited to teach the symbols and allegories of the Craft. The purpose of that house of memory would have been to lead the Freemason on a journey of spiritual discovery to the enlightenment promised by the Neo-Platonic and Hermetic philosophies. The material furniture and the actual officers would then have been only secondary representations of the mental realities. In support of Stevenson's proposition that the Masonic lodge is basically a nonmaterial house of memory, we can recall a fact he does nor dwell upon, namely that in the early days lodge meetings were held in public inns lacking the sort of furnishings that have become the norm in the Craft today. A prototype of the tracing board, a symbolical design of the lodge room, was drawn upon the floor with chalk and washed away at the end of the meeting. Those early facilities for lodge meetings were more consonant with a mental lodge than a physical one. Fellow inhabitants of the Masonic house of memory had, however, to identify themselves to one another physically by certain signs of recognition, in Scotland known collectively as the "Mason Word." An early reference to it is in a 1638 poem by Henry Adamson: Directory: files -> publications publications -> Table of Content forward introduction publications -> Acknowledging using our iris-related facilities and Data as of December 2013, updated July 2014 publications -> Theology beacon dictionary of theology publications -> Preparation of Papers for ieee transactions and journals publications -> Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies Georgia Institute of Technology publications -> Housing Counseling Research in Chicago publications -> Research papers: Total 163 papers: 88 publications -> Programme first draft publications -> Communicating with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Audiences Download 0.81 Mb. Share with your friends:
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